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Because I have so many friends in publishing, I’m privvy to lots of “insider” information.

One thing I heard recently was a discussion about electronic rights. Publishers are catching on to the fact that these can be pretty lucrative. Not to mention, this is the way our culture is going: mulit-media modes of communicating.

The trouble is, publishers almost never do what you can do with your material. And what they offer you for the rights is often a pittance of what you can make from your knowledge.

There are all sorts of implications to publishers keeping electronic rights as well as print rights. I suggest you read a very helpful article on the ways publishers benefit from electronic rights at the expense of authors.

This article also gives 8 excellent suggestions for negotiating electronic rights.

Another article, by the Author’s Guild, adds some helpful information about freelance articles and electronic rights. I remember signing away such rights to some of my articles, before I knew better. People would occasionally say, “I read your article in the most recent issue of X magazine” and I had never been contacted by the publisher, much less paid. (One reason I don’t write for magazines anymore.)

Bottom line: If you publish commercially, as opposed to self-publishing, be very careful about what rights you give up. Read carefully the articles mentioned here. If possible, only grant a publisher print rights. Hang on to everything else. As I teach elsewhere, you can make a lot of money from repurposing your content into other formats. Publishers are catching on to this, and want a piece of the pie.

Don’t let them, unless they know what they’re doing, offer you a fair contract, and you absolutley know you yourself won’t want to repurpose your content in any other way.

If you’ve had any experience with electronic rights, good or bad, feel free to post your comments.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under , Writing, publishing, promoting books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.